


mieux vaut plier que rompre

by goukyorin (sashimisusie)



Category: The Order: 1886
Genre: Game Spoilers, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-03-11
Packaged: 2018-03-17 08:09:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3521834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/pseuds/goukyorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without passion, the Marquis quipped then, an easy grin tugging at the corns of his eyes, a man cannot fight. Grayson had merely given him a look that spelled out his thoughts on the matter plainly, and that had been that. Or so they'd thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mieux vaut plier que rompre

Some say that love is for the young, and the incredibly stupid. The Marquis is not inclined to disagree on the latter, but the former is a falsehood plain and simple.

Here, hands hide stiff upper lips and even the merest unsolicited touch is warrant for scandal. He pats shoulders, offers smiles and presses kisses to gloved knuckles, sowing the seeds of emotion in his wake. Passion, and by extension, romance, is not merely the affair of the young and those who have taken leave of their senses. Without sparks, there can be no fire and what he sees is _stagnation_ in the ranks of the Order, an engine gone cold and still save for its core.

Without passion, he’d quipped then, an easy grin tugging at the corners of his eyes, a man cannot fight. Grayson had merely given him a look that spelled out his thoughts on the matter plainly, and that had been that. 

Lafayette is neither young nor old now, blood oath sworn to an order suspended in a state of agelessness while the world moves on. Life in all her fullness blooms and withers with the crest and  the close of each passing but the Knights themselves remain frozen, eternally cold and graven of dark ice until blade or bullet or claw rends them from the unnatural cycle.

Men were never meant to live like this, cut and cauterized from their humanity until the line between hunter and hunted so taut and blurred as to become invisible.

No, Lafayette thinks as Grayson's nips at skin left pale by stitched layers and reinforced seams and he groans--softly at first and louder later--into the supple curve of the man's neck, to be human is to  _feel_. By all that he holds dear, he feels and he aches with the fullness of it all, shifting and moving in a rhythm born of more decades of silent conversation than he cares to recall in the heat of the moment.

Back arching and hips lifting just enough from the bed to rub the sensitive head of his cock against the sheets tantalizingly, teasingly so, he pants in between breaths. “ My friend, Galahad. Be a little easier on me. You will leave a mark. ”

The man merely chuckles, the dark low sound settling at the base of Lafayette's spine where the heat gathers and pools, hands on his back to press him down roughly--but not unkindly--against the bed frame.

“ Don't you know, Marquis, that I am a knight no longer? ”

“  _C'est aussi vrai, mais l’habit ne fait pas le moine--ah!_  ”

Lafayette feels the man's release, a shuddering sigh that echoes to a place within him and leaves him pressing up and against the other for more. Calloused fingers tighten to near-painful against his shoulders and he rides the wave of pleasure--snatched from an iron grip and smoothed over with a skilled tongue--until his own crests and spills messily upon the sheets. Laid bare and undone before each other as they are now, there is little point in shyness and so he plunges forth into the uncharted sea that lies between them, and bridges the unspoken shuddering silence with words of his own.

His hand, uncharacteristically gentle, traces the dark hair that frames Grayson's jaw and follows the planes of corded muscle to rest against the still-hammering heart that hammers in the man's chest. Lafayette wants, if only for his own selfish desires, to capture the moment of softness that rounds out the harsh corners of the man's eyes, and the flutter-jump of pulse that quickens even now under his roving fingertips.

“ A man is more than his titles. You will always be a knight to me,  _mon ami_. I need not an Order to tell me what to believe. ”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title translation: better to bend than to break. A common proverb which basically means to go with the flow, or to adapt to changes with compromise and flexibility.
> 
> “ C'est aussi vrai, mais l’habit ne fait pas le moine--ah! ” ==> That is also true, but the clothes maketh not the monk. A proverb of sorts, the equivalent of 'don't judge a book by its cover'.


End file.
